Sunday, April 13. 2008

It's been a time since my last post here. There were two good reasons for my absence.
Basically I was busy. I have a business to run besides telling you about Chuck Berry's music. And this meant that while Berry was touring Europe and even performing in Germany, I was flying over the Atlantic heading the other direction multiple times doing business in the U.S. That left no time for writing articles here.
The second reason I didn't have time was related to this, but also completely unrelated. Heading multiple ten-hour flights, I went to my favorite book store to purchase some books to read during the long stays on board. And while browsing the Rock Music shelves, I came across two books I wanted to read since they first appeared in 1994 and 1999 but never found the time to do so. So I purchased Peter Guralnick's extensive biography on Elvis Presley. These are two very thick books so I needed more than just the flight times. And in fact I spent many hours afterwards finishing these. And this left no time to work on this blog as well.
I like Guralnick's writing since his 1971 "Feel Like Going Home" which among other things covered Chess Records in detail. This guy really knows what he is talking about. And this knowledge and detailed research can be seen on each and every page of this large two-volume work."Last Train to Memphis — The Rise of Elvis Presley" covers Elvis's life up until September 1958, while the second volume "Careless Love — The Unmaking of Elvis Presley" starts there and continues to Elvis's death in August 1977. You need to read both and you need to have time to do so. Together they have more than 1.400 pages, depending on which edition you get. I read the German translations which are even more voluminous. If you can find them, get the hardcover bindings as this number of pages is simply too much for a paperback.
What makes these two books outstanding is not their huge volume, it is their factualness. Whenever you read something about 1950's rock stars, and especially about Elvis, you are confronted with a huge pile of myths, covered by fandom. As said, Guralnick is different. Everything he writes is at least backed by facts and based on interviews with the people who were there. And where people's recollections do not match with each other or with published facts from newspapers or magazines, Guralnick tells you so. Not without reason, the books have thousands of footnotes with links to sources or additional comments.
However, while staying to the facts could make a reading boring, this here is not. Guralnick is really good at telling stories. Even though you already know the end of the story, you may not want to stop reading. Well, at least I didn't. Whether you learn about Elvis's way of recording, whether you read about him making films and concert tours, or whether you wonder about how his various girlfriends and the Memphis Mafia formed his closed world, this is not boring at all. The main aspects of the book are the people. Guralnick tries to find out and explain the personalities of Gladys, Vernon, Priscilla, Col. Parker, and all the other people who basically formed the man. And he tries to look behind the curtain to show the man himself, what he said, what he did, what he thought. While the end result of such could be questionable, with Guralnick's in-depth research it is not — or at least it sounds as if not.
Even such a voluminous work needs to omit things when it covers a complete lifetime of little more than 40 years. What I miss the most, especially in comparison to the contents of this site here, is the musical facts. While Guralnick writes about the recording sessions and about record releases, these comments are of very low priority. So if you are interested in when Elvis recorded Berry's "Promised Land" and how this was released, this is not the book for you. Such facts are hidden in half a sentence somewhere in between these hundreds of pages. I wish Guralnick had added a short appendix listing Elvis's records and movies, just for reference. But there are other Elvis books which fill these gaps. Also some more photographs would have been desired, especially where Guralnick writes about a special photo.
In any case, this two-volume biography is one of the best books on Rock music I have ever seen! Highly recommended!

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